Ansel Adams (31 page)

At dawn on June 6, 1944, the Allied forces began their invasion of the European continent. On tenterhooks, the world awaited the outcome of D-Day. Ansel and Nancy spent the afternoon with Stieglitz, Ansel photographing him in his gallery as Nancy showed him a group of photographs Beaumont had made while stationed in Egypt.
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After dinner, Ansel and Nancy joined the crowds thronging Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Probably for the first time, and perhaps for the last, Ansel lighted candles and prayed.
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Back in April, when Ansel first arrived in New York, he had known after only one look at Nancy’s tired and pale face that she must come back with him to California in June for a badly needed vacation. He had a tough time convincing her, but she finally acquiesced when he suggested that it could be a working vacation: she could fit in a few days with Edward in Carmel to plan his upcoming retrospective. With the promise of such benefits, the museum consented to give her some time off. Nancy and Ansel wrote to Beaumont in Italy to ask his permission, which he granted without hesitation. Then Ansel phoned Virginia, who agreed to drive down and pick them up on their arrival in Los Angeles.
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Nancy wrote to Beaumont,

It’s really touching and flattering that Ansel seems to prefer to be with me, just as he loved living our quiet life two years ago. I think we really are his dearest friends, and even with just me instead of both of us, he gets a feeling of being sustained. He said the other day that the three of us could never really fight, however much we might disagree.
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Ansel had a few appointments in Chicago, so Nancy agreed to meet him there, at the station, just before train time late in the day on June 8. Emotionally tattered by the growing pressures of the museum, she was full of misgivings about the trip and sure that she should remain at her post in New York. The museum’s funding had grown so tight that the department could no longer afford an assistant; Nancy was it, and with her away, there was no one at all.

The sleek train
City of Los Angeles
seemed to strain with eagerness to begin the journey. Lights blazed from every window, and the air was mysterious with steam. Ansel spotted a bedraggled Nancy staggering along with suitcase, typewriter, briefcase, camera, and tripod, and welcomed her with a huge bear hug that almost knocked off her designer hat. Already an old hand on the train, he showed her to her compartment, and then they walked back to the bar for a drink. Ansel had a smaller compartment in what he considered to be an ideal location, immediately past the bar. They spent three days on the train, working at their respective typewriters, stopping to enjoy cocktails, dinner, cigarettes, and conversation long into the evening.
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Virginia met them in Los Angeles and insisted that Nancy sit in the front seat for their drive to Yosemite via the Owens Valley, which would give her her first view of the great eastern wall of the Sierra. Nancy stayed with Ansel and Virginia in Yosemite for almost a month, setting up her typewriter on a little table under the incense-cedar trees and spending many hours photographing and working in the darkroom with Ansel as he taught her basic technique.
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Ansel was convinced that Nancy needed strengthening, both in mind and in body, to help her better contend with the machinations of the men at the museum. His program for her could be described as an early version of Outward Bound. Daily she would sit down at her typewriter, only to be pulled away by the insistent Ansel. First he took her on hikes, crossing tumbling creeks on fallen logs that seemed to her as narrow as tightropes; then he made her climb steep talus slopes from which she could only manage to descend on her seat. She protested that life in Manhattan had not equipped her for this.
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Not long after their return one day to the valley floor, Ansel shanghaied her to a practice cliff that he scrambled up in five minutes. He lowered a rope to her and coached her up from handhold to foothold while she swore under her breath.
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She wanted to give up, but Ansel praised each upward advance until she pulled herself safely onto the small granite ledge, where she was rewarded by the sight of streaks of crystalline quartz and alpine flowers, ferns and moss tucked into its corners. Nancy was hooked. When Ansel informed her that the only way down was to rappel, she was a little less dumbstruck than she would have been when this adventure began. Successfully back on terra firma, she felt that now she was the master of her fears.
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After spending a few days with Edward and Charis Weston in Carmel and meeting with Imogen Cunningham in San Francisco and Dorothea Lange in Berkeley, Nancy returned to New York with a new confidence and an updated three-year plan that she and Ansel had devised for the department. Its highlights included the Strand retrospective, blocked out for April 1945, followed by Edward’s in 1946 and then Ansel’s own in 1947.
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The challenges that Ansel had put before Nancy in Yosemite had been great learning lessons. Like the Cowardly Lion, she had persevered and found her own courage. She had previously been petrified of heights, but no longer: while visiting Stieglitz shortly after her return to New York, she flung open a window during a violent thunderstorm, boldly stuck out her head, and looked straight down to the street far below, as rain and lightning coursed through the air. She chuckled, thinking how relatively easy it would be to rappel down the seventeen stories.
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Ansel left California on January 15, 1945, for a full three months of work back east. A major assignment to picture the uses of gas in industry for the Columbia Gas Corporation in Columbus, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh more than covered the expenses for the entire trip, yielding a fat paycheck of twelve hundred dollars. Using color film and his five-by-seven-inch view camera, he photographed in factories producing such diverse products, through the benefit of gas, as crackers, crankshafts, and propellers. In Columbus, he was so intent on making a picture of newly made, nearly molten anchor chains that in the intense heat his pants caught fire.
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The nasty burn he suffered was treated with radioactive paste, a poultice that would have later consequences.

Ansel arrived in New York on February 1, 1945, to quite a welcome. In the basement darkroom he had designed for MoMA based on his own workspace in Yosemite, he found Paul Strand, who had no darkroom of his own, in residence, making prints for his upcoming show. Brett Weston had been assigned by the Signal Corps to photograph New York, so he was headquartered at the museum as well. In addition to the Strand show, Nancy was coordinating a museum-sponsored six-week-long workshop given by Ansel for professionals and advanced amateurs, as well as an extensive evening lecture course.
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Ansel’s events, not only full but oversubscribed, were a great success and raised a good deal of money for the department.
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Classes ran for nine hours on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with all-day Saturday field trips and night lecture sessions on Mondays and Fridays.
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The publisher Willard Morgan was so impressed that he contracted with Ansel to write a series of books on photographic technique. Nancy had hired a stenographer, Lee Benedict, to record the entire workshop, and when he read her transcription, Ansel decided that even given the many projects to which he was already committed, he could “write” the books by hiring Lee, along with her little machine, to be his ever-present sidekick. She consented to meet him in Yosemite in late May.
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Ansel had one more goal to achieve on this trip: he had booked a recording studio to make a set of records of him playing the piano. Diligent practice was essential, and although he had a room at the Gotham Hotel, Nancy agreed to let him have a rented Steinway baby grand piano delivered to her apartment. This was accomplished by means of a crane that swung the instrument through her window.

At the end of each day, Ansel, often accompanied by friends such as Strand or Marin, would return to Nancy’s for an hour or more of practice. Ansel did not know how to make a quiet entrance; at the doorbell, he did not just buzz but beeped the rhythmic opening bars from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Afraid of being taken too seriously, he would purposely finish each evening’s recital before the end of a piece, and always on a wrong note. This was invariably followed by his favorite sound effect, his rascally donkey bray.

It did not take many repetitions of this performance before residents throughout the entire apartment building became angry. Unbeknownst to Nancy and Ansel, they could hear everything through the thin walls. It turned out that many of them were professional musicians, and they would sit up in bed to listen to Ansel play but would become frustrated when he never finished a composition, ending instead with an unintelligible profanity. To make peace, Ansel promised that henceforth he would always properly complete the music, cut out the donkey embellishment, and keep to a ten o’clock curfew.
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Ansel completed the recordings on the night of April 3. Of the ten pieces, he was most proud of Mozart’s “Rondo à la Turca” from Sonata no. 9, a Scriabin Prelude, and Bach’s “Arioso,” C Major Prelude, and “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Fifteen sets of records were pressed, three for his family and the others for his best friends: the Newhalls, McAlpins, Wrights, Strands, and Spencers. That night, finally finished, he collapsed from exhaustion. Shocked to see this monument to energy struck so low, Nancy pushed him into a cab and ordered him to go directly back to his hotel and to bed.
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Ansel left for California the next day, with two weeks of meetings, lectures, and workshops—in Memphis, Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis—standing between him and home.

At 2:41
a.m.
on May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies.
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Major Beaumont Newhall returned home almost immediately, although he was not officially released from the Army Air Force until September 20. On leave, he picked up Nancy and headed for California, where they were to spend a second honeymoon with Ansel and Virginia in Yosemite. They had a great time photographing and hiking, and Nancy demonstrated her newly acquired mountaineering skills. The Newhalls’ talks with Ansel were intense and, as always, centered on photography.

Ansel tried to convince them that no creative person should live in the East, which was a constant drain on the soul. Everything could be better accomplished in the West. He longed for Beaumont and Nancy to relocate to California and proposed that together they open an institute for photography or publish a journal to rival
Camera Work.

But Beaumont was ready to tackle MoMA once more, to raise funds and build a staff and a collection, and in October, he returned as curator of the Department of Photography. Citing nepotism, the museum refused to allow him to keep Nancy on as his assistant, although she continued to work on Edward’s 1946 retrospective.
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Beaumont discovered a museum quite different from the one he had left. During the war, MoMA’s trustees had summarily demoted Alfred Barr, the gentle spirit who had been the founding director. No longer a quiet place of scholarly gentlemen, MoMA was now positioning itself in the modern world: the museum as big business.
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Without consulting the advisory committee (or Beaumont himself), the trustees appointed Edward Steichen director of the Department of Photography over Beaumont, whom they felt should stay on in the number-two post, as curator. Steichen was the most famous living photographer in the world, and his ideas received rapt attention. With the support of his good friend Tom Maloney, Steichen promised to collect a hefty infusion of a hundred thousand dollars from photographic manufacturers to start the department’s postwar years with an economic bang, and he projected a bevy of theme shows guaranteed to pack MoMA’s galleries and fill its coffers. One trustee explained the situation to Beaumont: Steichen’s plans were guaranteed to be popular, like the Harvard football team, while Beaumont’s projects were a lesser attraction, like the rowing crew.
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Beaumont was astounded. Steichen represented the antithesis of what he, Nancy, and Ansel had been working to achieve at the museum; in their view, Steichen treated photography as a tool by which to manipulate easy emotions, rather than as a unique and profound art. After exchanging a series of anguished letters with Ansel, Beaumont realized there was no way he could work for a man with such goals.
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Ansel advised him to quit.
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On March 7, 1946, Beaumont resigned. He wrote Ansel, “The Rubicon is passed. The die is cast.”
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The entire photography advisory committee soon quit in protest.
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As a side effect, although Strand and Weston were given their solo retrospectives, Ansel’s was canceled. Not until seventeen years after Steichen’s 1962 retirement would Ansel have his only solo exhibition at the museum to which he had given so much. A place that for some six years took photography as seriously as it did the other arts, MoMA now became the home of the photographic spectacle. Although Steichen would also present such important modern artists as Robert Frank and Aaron Siskind, the dominating example of his tenure must be the biggest blockbuster of all, the undeniably maudlin
The Family of Man
.
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For Ansel and the Newhalls, the appointment of Edward Steichen was a huge setback to the promotion of photography as a fine art. Steichen’s powerful personality was a singular experience. When he finally exited MoMA, the photography department returned to its original intentions as conceived by Beaumont, Ansel, and David McAlpin back in 1940.